


Overthink This

by kwoah



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, Hand Jobs, Masturbation, One Night Stands, Orgasm, Smut, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Vanilla
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26354599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwoah/pseuds/kwoah
Summary: Ekko and Taliyah bone down. Annoyingly circuitous prose.
Kudos: 11





	Overthink This

His quick climb shoved embarrassment away, exercise filling his head like inert gas and leaving no air for shame to burn. From here, the roofs stretched in all directions, even up. The monolithic plumbing that tied the city together rose from the streets in the distance, blurred by haze where they disappeared into the upper levels. The ceiling here was the floor above, carpeted with soot and dripping with condensation and other unknowables. Day and night tried to sneak into Zaun but got an impassive stare from thousands of industrial chem-lights and took the hint. Without a clock, you could barely tell what time it was. Morning was never clean here, never fresh. The city itself seemed to expel visitors and travelers like infections; one of the only places to stay was a run-down inn in an industrial district so thick with steam and chem-byproducts that you didn’t so much inhale the air as digest it.

This city was dangerous, but the labyrinthine Verticals were his domain.  _ This _ beam could be a bridge and  _ this _ gutter was just within his grasp. Although he did not wear his Z-drive, he moved as easily as if he were still walking on the street below and almost ran over the sudden cliffs and steep declines of Zaun’s roof. And then he leapt and his feet found nothing but air. The fire escape railing that normally caught his foot had been taken away, because the owner inside heard at random hours a clang coming from the railing at about the volume of a teenage boy’s hobnailed boot impacting a four foot bar of iron and, unable to diagnose the cause, had simply removed the rail. The boy of course had no idea of this, and felt only a clang at about the volume of a teenage boy’s stomach dropping to his feet. The fog that hung in the streets below swallowed him like a hungry dragon. In a quarter-second it was over, and the only trace of the wiry figure running the rooftops was a swirl of mist and the definite suggestion of a  _ blurp _ . He fell. His sword shook free of its sheath, ricocheting from the narrow walls. It bounced past and above him as if wielded by an inhumanly agile fencer, stabbing and slicing through the mist. He dodged forward and backward until a pipe,almost encrusted with gauges, caught the strap of his knapsack with a rip that sounded like radio static.

A single sealed bottle slipped from the rip noiselessly and he caught it between his feet. His left hand smacked reflexively at his wrist, trying to activate the time machine that would have hung from his back had it not sat disassembled in several dozen pieces, some so unstable that he’d had to make a second smaller time machine to even work on them, on his workbench, at home.

He looked up, a smile of incredulity falling onto his face so unexpectedly that it displaced the fear. He was wearing the same smile when the last thread of his backpack ripped with a protracted noise and he fell, grinning, into the fog.

I talked to him! I talked to him!

She moved lightly, making her walk a dance. It had been a short conversation but he had been interested, and charitable enough to take her nervous mental missteps in stride. Her ears reddened as she recalled some of the more personal things she’d blurted: her uncertainty in her abilities, the way goat’s milk reminded her of her childhood, and of course (she retroactively cringed) that fantastic line about the earth moving. That had been for her mind alone, but her speech center had gotten hold of it like a secret. She thought he had winced, but it might have been her imagination.

She put her hands out and spun in a circle. There was nobody about. The inn she was staying at was in the heart of Zaun, an irregularly shaped cobblestone square surrounded by decrepit factories and the magical industries that had sprung up in their shells like hermit crabs after the advent of chem- and hextech. She had met him in the fringe markets where Zaun was grafted to Piltover, and there was still some air in the air. At first she had been confused at the lack of lodging, but he had assured her this was intentional. 

“Zaun doesn’t like visitors. Spend your money in the market, see the sights, but move on. If you try to stay, this city kicks you out. And if it doesn’t, I do.”

Immediately after delivering this ultimatum he seemed remember something vital he’d forgotten, or perhaps realize something that had been bubbling just below his consciousness. He immediately stuttered and reddened, beveling the veiled threat behind his words with an offer. “But. If you’re looking for a place to stay, I know this whole city. There’s an inn where diplomats and other people who for some reason or other need to spend time in this smoke cloud of a city can stay. Take the wires down to level four, Krox sector. The Smoking Vial. Give this-” he traced a quick note on a notebook sheet, and tore it out- “to the man there, and, uh, be patient with him. He’s a friend and a nice guy, but he makes a  _ sharp _ first impression.”

She recognized the building from the swinging sign, a triangular fluted glass beaker overflowing with vapor and foam. The foam was green, of course, because everyone knew beakers bubbled green. It was tall, with lighted windows like vertebrae up the thick stone wall. She put her hand on the door, then something he had said came back to her. She made a quick preparation, then opened the door.

There was a twang and a sound like  _ klatch _ . The girl yelped. She held out the note with a quivering hand. “I’ve, er, got. a. thing. You should read- Oh!” She gasped again as the note was torn from her fingers. There was a noise of a reel operating.

“Ah. You’re with that rascal boy,” the voice was reedy. “I do owe him one, don’t I.” She lowered the flagstone, glancing at the deep chip that had been taken out of it. The man in the corner was peering at the note and trying to read around the hole that had been punched in the middle. He looked up at her, his eyes dark but gleaming in a face covered with burn scars like blotchy continents. “A young lady. Well, flux me. I was wonderin’ about that.”

“I don’t have money.”

“Ah, that’s no trouble. He stays here himself, now and then, and I don’t much mind. He did me a great help. My face ‘s nothing marvelous to behold, and my legs, well. But it’s about as well as I can hope for after acute Chem exposure. I could be dead, or worse. He’s a good lad.”

He gazed into the thick glass of the furnace window, the scars on his cheeks and nose cast orange by the blaze. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then his arm shot out from under the blanket like a spring. 

“The lift, to the top floor room. Key’s in the lock. Lift Behind you. You see him again, you tell him thanks.”

The lift was a cramped room that hissed with steam pressure as she stood before it. She took a deep breath and stepped in, but as soon as she put weight from her foot onto the platform the hiss of steam became a shriek and the lift shuddered. She withdrew her weight and the pressure whistle subsided mockingly. The girl’s guts coiled as she recalled the swaying ride down on the wire gondola, and that had very nearly been ugly in a semidigested way. The outside of the building was stone. Could she...

“I’ll just be going out for a few minutes. I need some fresh air.” 

The innkeeper held up a finger, but saw no point. “Out of towners,” he said to himself as the wisps of Gray from the closing door curled around his chair, “all the same.”

Elsewhere, two coins clinked to the uneven stones with jolly ringing noises. A notebook and shower of pencil stubs followed them. Before they had even stopped bouncing, an oversized clock hand had wedged itself upright between two cobbles with a hum. The final junk fell: A torn knapsack spilling various spare parts, a boot, a scuffed boy, four pocket-watches each showing a different time, and an unbroken bottle of goat’s milk with the insignia of a muscular, smiling, mustachioed man clutched in an upraised hand.

She shut the window. The room was clean. A raised pallet in an alcove, with bedclothes. A table stood in front of the door flanked by two low chairs. Randomly shaped pillows perched on the furniture. It was clear that the innkeeper had heard of pillows, and how they made a room look nice, but was unclear on the fundamental principle. The walls were made of the same smooth cream-colored stone as the outside of the building, but their color was more apparent here due to the lack of soot. A few wall hangings in inoffensive colors softened the stone and the wooden planks of the floor were so worn that the grain stood out against the soles of her now-shoeless feet in textured relief. No, not fancy, but palatial compared to her recent accommodations.

“Hummmmmm,” she threw her head back and rolled it, stretching the knots that had formed from fatigue. She carelessly tossed her knapsack by the stone ledge of the bed and sank with a sigh into the armchair. Privacy was a luxury she had not had lately. The roads leading to the Twin Cities were crowded with merchants and militants moving in both directions. Sleep was impossible in the cheap flophouses if you valued your life or your boots. She slowly removed her stone hairpiece and bracelets, setting them on the table in front of her. The flowing red overcoat was tossed onto the pallet and she leaned back, dressed now in a purple blouse and pants. 

At first she tried to sleep, but she found that her tiredness had deserted her. Then she tried to relax, but leftover excitement and travel-honed instincts wouldn’t let her. So, she paced, and remembered. Her home in Shurima, still waiting, no doubt. Nothing would have changed there. The goats would be let out in the morning, pulling tufts of grass from the scree slopes. The warm air and cold wind, the mountain eagles, the sliver of blinding gold on the horizon where dead-but-dreaming Shurima shone. Ever since she had started drawing power, she could feel it shining, a city built of myth and layered with history deeper than the sand. It was wrong. It squatted like a spider in a web. Lines of power stretching the world over were warped and pinned unnaturally to it, a piece of cloth bunching where a fraying thread is pulled. Few could see them, but for those who could it was like a constant ache. She felt it in her neck, a pressure, strong when she was closeby and weak but not absent when she ventured far. Its influence had all but vanished in Ionia, where the threads of magic were so thick and strong they drowned out the distant corruption. 

Ionia. When she thought of that, of course, she her mind couldn’t help but think of the two-

But no, she didn’t want to think about that right now. Instead, she remembered Yasuo. He was almost as strong as she was, but something under the guise of a lonely outcast scared her. He had liked what he did. The blood never seemed to touch him, the gashes left in the ground by his attacks were elegant and hideous. And there had been glee in his work, though he would deny it. He fought for his life, but as long as those streaks of blood weren’t his, he wouldn’t mind continuing to.

Her waterskin, a lump of cheese wrapped in wax, a loaf of bread with crust so tough it didn’t need a wrapper, and, most precious of all, a small pot of honey. She kicked the backpack shut along with her blouse and took her meal to the windowsill. With a small Demacian steel knife she cut the bread into two hemispheres and peeled the cheese away from its shell. One half was eaten with the cheese, the other half was eaten first with the honey, then when hungry inspiration struck, with honey and cheese together. As she raised the last bite to her mouth, a precarious slab of cheese frosted with honey toppled onto her front. She sank her teeth into the bread to free her hands and muttered a curse far worse than the cheese deserved through the mouthful. 

It had landed honey-side down on the silk sash wrapped around her chest. She chewed the far-too-large bite and untucked the sash in the back with an empty hand. It fell to her lap. Carefully, so as not to damage the fine silk, she scraped away as much of the honey as she could with the wicked edge of the knife and sucked the stain on the fabric, nominally trying to remove the sticky patch but truthfully savoring every bit of the honey she could. It wasn’t every day she could splurge on things like that. 

Satisfied with the cleaning job, she made to retie the sash. It felt good to take it off, though, the air cool on her skin and back after a day and a half being covered. No reason to put it on again now, she thought. Besides, she rebelled against the thought of cooping up her breasts again. Instead, she tied the sash like a headband to keep the tickly hair out of her eyes. She brought her feet up to sit criss-cross on the hard ledge. As her tongue worked the last of the bread out of her molars, one hand idly cupped a breast. She gazed out the window for a while, absentmindedly, eyes fixed on a distant but impossibly bright industrial chem-lamp, refracted by the cheap glass into a yellow blotch. 

During their less-hyperkinetic moments, the vastaya had tried to teach her to meditate by chanting or prayer beads, but the only method that had seemed to stick was sitting in the dark staring wide-eyed at a candle without blinking until the eyes stung and tears tickled her nose, and then when the candle burned out closing the eyes and fixing the bright spot in your brain until all the peripheral circuits started to go dead, cognition-wise, and when the afterimage of the candle finally faded you weren’t quite asleep or awake and when you opened your eyes you could feel, actually  _ feel _ the clockwork in your head start moving again and you were that much more thankful for it, the cognition, than you had been and strangely thinking seemed like less of a burden than it had before, even though you’d just basically smothered it like the end of a cigarette ground with boot-heel against the void. She always felt thirsty after she meditated, like the candle had evaporated or boiled away all the moisture in her mouth and she had memories of drinking five or six cups of absolutely freezing water, glacial meltwater from streams in the mountains and then running off without Yas or either of the vastaya and looking for great things to apply her brain to.

When she opened her eyes after meditating, she grabbed the waterskin and drained it, tossed it onto the floor. Reflexively, she returned a hand to her breast and let the other drift between her legs, tapping the fabric over her clit. Walking and sleeping rough seemed to do that, she’d found. Weeks spent exhausted every day, crashing under trees and in barns, pulling 16 hour days walking and surfing stone sent her body into survival mode. No calories or time to waste. No urges, barely a thought every few days. Then of course the other side of the coin of which gray thoughtless travel days were one side, once she got a good meal and a private space and no farther to walk than the tea shop down the street, the switch in the ‘on’ position again, staring at people, her hands all over herself when she was alone unless she made conscious effort, awareness no longer drifting away over the road but sharp, anisotropic and focussed in her head, her hands, her skin. 

She’d lost her mindful posture, slumped back in the high nook and one leg unfolded to brush against the floor. Her pants had been pulled down just enough to let her middle and ring fingers trace busy little circles through the brown curls at the top of her mons. Her toes and the fingers of her other hand clenched and opened impotently. She whispered something, repeatedly.

Figured that he’d slip the one day his drive was broken. He was incapable at the moment of feeling too bad, but he muttered like he always did. What was the point of building impossible time-defying technomantic marvels if you still slipped like anybody else? As he approached the Smoking Vial, he noticed that the innkeeper had done a little landscaping. Winding, ladderlike designs had been carved all the way up the facade of the building. Ending at the window of the top floor suite, the rungs were interspersed with jutting flakes. It wasn’t very surprising. Things like that were easy to do with corrosives and a 5Point liquid control system, and there were places in town where rock-etching acids came out of the tap about as frequently as water.

He stood outside the door, straightened his torn clothes. He stepped forward, opened the door halfway, closed it, waited for the  _ klatch _ , then stepped in quickly. Augus looked up quickly from the crossbow he was cocking with the aid of a hook built into the floor, and relaxed, a little guiltily, when he recognized the boy. He leaned the weapon against the side of the chair again.

“You. Guess I shoulda been expectin’ you.”

“Augus. How’s business?”

“Ah, it’s slow. Not ten people since the convention last year. Somethin’s scarin’ them off.”

“How unfortunate,” the boy said with a glance at the businesslike crossbow. It gave an oily click, though Augus hadn’t touched it.

“Your friend’s the first customer in two days. Just my luck she ain’t payin’.” He winked at the boy.

“So she got here OK?”

“Mmm. Not bein’ a doctor or anything of the persuasion, I don’t feel that I can tell ya whether she was OK. But she got here.”

“Which room?”

“Top floor. Ain’t had any big-wigs come through in weeks. Nobody’ll come trying to rent it.

“And,” he added with a scarred grin, “you two won’t have to worry bout me listenin’ or nothing.” The grin widened as the boy tried to disguise his embarrassment with the cough-and-shuffle but only ended up making it obvious. Augus would never have seen a little flush on his black skin.

“It’s nothing like that. I’m just here to deliver a little gift,” he held up the bottle of milk lamely. “Goat.”

“Oh, yes. A gift. Certainly, certainly. Traditional, I believe,” Augus intoned with exaggerated seriousness. “If that’s the case, you’ll probably want to wait here for her. She’s stepped out for some air, believe it or not. I know that gifts of that sort are always better delivered  _ in person _ .”

It was more than he could take. “THANK you, Augus. I think I’ll deliver it to her rooms now, and be on my way.”

“But you won’t see her?”

“Did she really go out?”

“Yeah. That wasn’t part of the joke.”   
Well, that was that, then. He might as well prove the old man wrong. 

“Well then, Augus, I guess I won’t see her. I wasn’t particularly eager to see her tonight anyway.” A lie, several parts of his brain contradicted. “I’ll just leave it on the coffee table. A note or something.” 

He moved toward the lift.

“Wait there lad,” Augus’ grave voice reached him as he stepped into the lift. “Let me share a piece of advice all men learn when they’re courting.” 

Against his better judgement, the boy paused with his hand on the lift lever.

“When the time comes, if you find yourself in a… dilemma,” The boy’s hand savagely jammed the lever in the ‘UP’ position, and the lift rose quickly with a whine of steam. The triumphant voice rose after him, mixing with the noise.

“Kraken’s gizzard oil! A teaspoonful in the tea and a few drops applied directly to th-”

It’d taken her a while to really appreciate it, probably because for the first few years of adolescence she’d paid attention to the parts of her vulva and vagina that weren’t her clitoris only to quickly rinse them and monthly to use the tightly wound cotton cylinders her friend had shown her how to buy from the caravans from deeper in Shurima, where they could grow cotton next to the slow rivers but there was no ground to graze goats for wool. When she would wander off before dinner to the bluffs and reach into her pants (and then later, after some tactful but pointed remarks from her mother about certain aspects of the laundry, take her pants off completely), she realized pretty quick that while she could engender a number of interesting sensations, the little junction where her labia came together got  _ results _ . It wasn’t until her late teenage years, when she’d been taking a night pee out down the hill and was quickly and pleasantly ambushed by memories of a girl from Uzeris that had passed through some weeks earlier with the traders and had, of course, noticed her hanging around the stall all day without buying or selling and after closing up she (the trader) had walked with her out to the bluff and kissed her once, firmly, and after peeing she hadn’t even pulled her pants back up but just sat back on the heather and put her ring finger inside herself. She hadn’t heard trumpets or seen stars except the everynight kind cold and hard above hills, but there had been a sensation. It was, “Oh, that’s  _ nice _ ,” and it was so strong she spoke it: “Oh.” The whole-body full feeling was obscenely pleasant but it was a directionless pleasure that didn’t lead higher, so she situated her finger in a comfortable place and rubbed her clit until she came, gasping  _ uh _ because the trader girl had never given her a name, marvelling at the rhythmic flutter of her internal musculature and then had to walk unsteadily back to the hut in pitch darkness and suddenly melting tired.

In the top floor of an inn in Zaun, she leaned her head against the cool glass and happily put a finger in herself and played with her clit and thought very hard about the boy who was now in the lift outside her door, and heard very little she did not want to hear.

He absentmindedly tweaked the squeaky lift valve with a wrench from his backpack, and the angry leak subsided into the smooth hiss of well-used steamtech. He composed another note on a page from his notebook, writing in the Noxian runes that looked so  _ cool _ carved into stone but a little gaunt when you wrote them on paper. The lift glided to a stop. Top floor. There was no anteroom, just the imitation wood of the inward-opening door directly in front of the lift. Augus wasn’t lying. The key was still in the outside lock of the door. Nobody had used it yet. He took a deep breath and reached over his shoulder to pull the cord that would define his reset point, but found nothing. He smiled, shook his head.

The door opened.

Human perception is such a finely calibrated thing. Ekko stepped into the room, wiped his nose, read over his note one more time, carefully, and leaned down to place the bottle on the table before he noticed the things that he had not been expecting to see and simply failed to register like a leather backpack, some random articles of clothing and a waterskin on the floor, two sturdy but extremely well-worn leather boots, and a mostly naked woman by the window looking at him with limbs in the reflexive hide-the-important-bits pose. He made a small choking noise, and his face flushed so fast his eyes watered.

“I-” he said, then made a few explanatory gestures with the milk, then some apologetic gestures toward the door. He began to back out. Taliyah fixed him with a look and then, bizarrely, smiled.

“Wait,” she mouthed, “is that goat’s milk?” Her voice was quiet. He nodded dumbly.

“Really? Thank you. Leave it there on the bed, then.” She pointed with one hand; Ekko didn’t even try to avoid looking at what it had covered.

He set the bottle on the bed. Taliyah looked him up and down. He became aware of his stare and looked at the grain of the floor instead. 

“Have you ever had goat’s milk?” 

“No.” He managed.

“Oh, hell. Do you want to stay a while?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yeah. A little.”

Ekko met her eyes with a bit of effort. What was  _ that _ expression? “Alright.”

“OK. Wait outside a minute.”

The door closed.

Thirty-eight seconds later, the door opened. They looked at each other across the threshold.

“This is the part where you invite me in,” said Ekko, who had thought a bit and was more confident that he had the shape of the situation. 

He had grown good at that: people weren’t usually cryptic and unpredictable, they behaved like people. He remembered when he had started using the Z-drive, trying again and again to navigate interaction and combat and finding them somewhat similar, spending what would have been hours if he had been in a space where hours existed, trying to think circles around every path his counterpart could take until they had no more paths but the one he wanted. He didn’t need to do that anymore, though he couldn’t tell exactly what part of his technique had improved. If pressed he might say that he was better at telling what people were thinking, but it wasn’t some kind of mind-meld psychic power. It was the realization that people had intentions and in the vast majority of circumstances they felt no need to disguise them. They tried not to, even if they didn’t know it. Anyone who wasn’t a stone-cold professional couldn’t help but communicate. They were so used to it, steeped in it. It had worked for them, got them what they wanted to get and where they wanted to be. And then suddenly it worked so well that it worked right out from under them and the smiling boy with the big tarpaulin-covered backpack that went  _ whrmmmmm  _ was on his way and those close-minded, belligerent few that, even after a frank conversation they were quickly realizing they had never controlled, would still have detained him found that, aw heck, they might as well let him go this time on account of their diaphragm not working properly after a few intimate encounters between their belly and an oversized clock hand. It never took him more than a few tries now. Not that there was anything difficult about guessing that he would be invited in.

“Come on in,” said Taliyah. She had a milk moustache.

Ekko walked in. She pulled the key out of the door behind him and shut it. The clothes were off the floor.

“Try this.”

He took the offered bottle and sampled it. Taliyah sat on the bed. She primly straightened the hem of her shirt.

“I don’t think I have ever tasted something like that.”

“Describe it.”

“Haven’t you…”

“I want to hear it from you.”

Ekko dragged a chair around to face the bed-ledge. Taliyah was sitting cross-legged, and watched him intently.

“It’s... fatty. Pretty strong flavor that I  _ might _ recognize.”

“It tastes how goats smell. That’s what you’re trying to remember.”

“That’s probably it. I don’t know where I would have smelled goats before.”

“It’s, um, not the kind of smell you forget easily. You probably smelled a whiff of it in a market somewhere and didn’t even associate it with the goats. Not everyone likes it.”

“And you do, I guess.”

Taliyah had the bottle to her mouth and her eyebrows wiggled a bit in agreement. Instead of swallowing quickly and answering, she rolled the milk around in her mouth like wine.

“Maybe lukewarm milk was not the drink for a first date,” said Ekko, who was watching with horrified fascination. Taliyah swallowed.

“It just brings out the flavor more.”

“I’m not sure I want to enhance the flavor of something I can pick out of a thousand other smells from across the market.”

Something about the phrasing jogged Taliyah’s memory. 

“So the... stuff here. The hextech and chemtech. It’s magic?”

“Magic and science. We’re not hacks. Uh, not that you are.”

Taliyah waved away his apology impatiently. “The kind of magic that draws from leylines?”

“Parts of it, yeah.”

“And can you feel that some leylines are… messed up?”

Ekko’s eyes widened. “The first and sixth azimuthal leylines aren’t quite parallel with the rest and it’s getting worse. When I say worse, though, I mean relative. The discrepancy is still less than one-tenth of a degree. I don’t think many people outside the university in Piltover even know about it though, since it never matters unless whatever you’re building a leybasis into requires  _ exact _ precision.”  _ Like a time machine,  _ he thought.

“But, wait. You can  _ feel _ them? Are you sure that’s what it is?”

“Well, pretty sure,” Taliyah shrugged. “Out of parallel is a good way to put it. I would have said ‘wrong’, like a fraying thread. I don’t really know what that technical stuff means.”

“Woah. What’s it feel like?”

“Bad. Sore, like a headache or a stiff neck at best. Worse when I’m on a long magic drag.”  _ Or near Shurima. _

“That sounds rough. It’s bad enough having to correct for it when you build things. I can’t imagine feeling it.”

They were silent for a moment. Taliyah pressed on her neck, self consciously trying to gauge whether her neck actually hurt or whether it was psychosomatic.

“It went away in Ionia. Or if it didn’t, it was unnoticeable.”

“Just because of the latent magic?”

“Yeah. It was so strong sometimes that I could barely stand it, especially when I got too far from the quinlons. You know about those? Big magic sinks?”

“Yeah. There was some hextech at an exhibition last year that adapted their design.”

“Well, when I was up in the mountains it was distractingly strong. I would forget to eat, to sleep. I learned how to meditate, though, and after a while I got acclimated to it. They taught me to when they realized I was especially sensitive to magic.”

“They?”

“Yeah. I met some people there who… knew a lot about latent magic.”

“Oh man. It would be amazing to try and work in Ionia for a while, tap a huge excess of magic like that. Hextech is nice, but sometimes it’s such a chore trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of a magical potential.”

“That was... definitely not a problem in Ionia.”

Taliyah took another sip of milk, and the tide of conversation ebbed, water draining away to reveal what had been hidden beneath the surface, now standing jagged and dangerous and interesting in the uneasy silence.

“That’s one of the reasons that chemtech is so useful, since it acts as both a source and conduit of-”

“Do you want to, er,” Taliyah interrupted him. She could hear the tone in his voice become professorial, a record dropping into a groove worn deep with thought. Thought was fine, but she had little desire to hear the specifics of the chem refinement and infusion process. At least not at the moment. “Talk about earlier?”

“What’s to say? Sorry I didn’t knock.”

“Yeah, what was up with that?”

“Key still in the lock. Nobody had used the door, but I see now that you climbed the wall outside and forgot to lock the door. Squeaky lift?”

“Hm, yeah. Exactly, actually. It’s alright, by the way.”

“So it’s cool that I saw, you know. What you were up to.”

“Oh, yes. It’s nothing you yourself are unfamiliar with, I’ll bet. I’m not bothered if you’re not.”

“Not a bit.”

“That’s perfect then. The world’s too lovely to waste time being embarrassed about something we both do, about being human, because it’s  _ impolite _ .” She looked at him and smiled. “What do you say?”

And Ekko met her eyes and thought: _she’s so_ _sexy_. The thought had been born earlier that afternoon several levels lower in his consciousness and had climbed the ladder, schmoozed and chatted with his id, put in time, done the legwork (or at least the axon-work), and finally burst onto the stage of his cortex as Taliyah looked at him. He opened his mouth slightly. _Involuntary communication_. There had been a question.

“You cross your arms and fiddle with your elbows when you’re nervous.” Ekko said to the ground. “You’re speaking quickly compared to this afternoon. Your breathing is fast compared to earlier and I bet your heart rate is elevated. It’s warm in the room but you sometimes shiver. And though you’re sitting cross-legged, you’ve been stretching the skirt of your tunic over your lap all night like there’s something you don’t want me to see.”

Taliyah froze, partway through smoothing her skirt as he’d described. Her face flushed but she smiled sheepishly. 

“I’m not my own, it seems. Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” said Ekko easily. “Yes. It’s a yes. But say it back, because I’m tired of guessing how people feel.”

Taliyah’s fingers curled, grabbing the hem of her skirt and lifting it so he could see.

“If I say no,” she confided, “I think I’ll explode.

“Oh,” said Ekko. “It’s bad, huh.”

“It’s not usually so much, but I stopped right before I was done. And, it’s been a while.”

“So it’s been like that the whole time?” Ekko asked. At least a hard-on went away after a few minutes without leaving the kind of dark-on-purple blot Taliyah’s leggings showed. “That can’t have been comfortable.”

“Comfortable?” Said Taliyah. “No.” She stood up quickly from the bed and moved to where Ekko sat. She put her hands on her hips. “It isn’t comfortable. It’s slimy and kind of cold and currently ruining my only pair of pants.”

Ekko looked at her. Her face was pink.

“In fact, I might even say that it’s really quite  _ un _ comfortable.”

He was sitting straight-backed as she let a little reprimand leak into her voice like shifting rock. She sat on him, legs straddling his lap. He gripped the arms of the chair.

“Which is why I would really like you to help me  _ do. something. about it _ .”

She kissed him. It was easy. His head was already angled upward towards her face and his mouth was open slightly. She just had to reach down, lift his face. 

Ekko’s hands grasped the air uncertainly and, because it felt right, drifted to Taliyah’s hips. Her muscles were hard and wiry. How far had she walked on a diet of travelling rations and tainted magic? He had a sudden thought that they should go for late-night noodles after this, and his brain tried to assemble a list of vendors, but found that the circumstances were less than conducive to detailed recall.

If Zaun had no hot water, it had nothing. Whenever Ekko was home in the morning he would masturbate in the shower in a perfunctory way to work through some of the sex drive that those various glands (what were they even good for?) pumped out, and once it was over, the evidence dripping down his frenulum and knuckles and circling the drain and he’d knelt to spare his shaking knees and calmed his breathing he didn’t have too much trouble with inopportune hard-ons or distracted day-dreaming for the rest of the day, even if he hadn’t come for a few days beforehand. This was far from an inopportune time, but he had been nervous for a minute or two all the same. It was what put a pebble in the soft rice of Augus’ teasing: the constant fear that this time, the first time he would have sex, it wouldn’t work right. Nevermind that it had worked a thousand times in the shower.

His pants were baggy, patched, and thin as muslin at the wear points. They were light enough to be carried up in a tent by his stiffening penis until it pressed against the body on his lap. The pressure made his penis harder. Hands squeezed his shoulders.

Taliyah’s hips twitched as she felt the touch against her crotch. She dropped a hand from Ekko’s shoulder, lifting goosebumps down his chest and resting against the beltstring. The kiss ended, because Taliyah needed to look him in the eye. Her face was tense, almost somber. There was, Ekko realized, a most probable question.

“Yeah. Please.”

The hand moved under his waistband, then withdrew and tugged at the hitch that held his waist up. He undid it, lifted his butt for a moment to slide his pants down enough, watched as the pale hand hooked the waist of his trousers below his navel and pulled down to release his penis, which bounced up from the waistband. It lay against Taliyah’s pants, right over the wet spot. The warm breath hitting his shoulder quickened. There wasn’t much room between their bodies, but she managed to position her hand to get a grip on his penis.

“Try it up and down, so the- yeah.” Ekko closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around Taliyah’s back. Leaned against her chest. 

The fabric of her shirt was warm, and rose and fell, and smelled like sweat and a tired human body. Not unpleasant, just alive. Her hand pulled his foreskin up and down over the head, a gentle pleasant tug that communicated itself deep down in his belly. He tried to flatten his cheek against her body.

Taliyah made a noise like _hm_ and Ekko opened his eyes. She was still gazing down with a thoughtful expression, eyes wide and clear, mouth open slightly. She might be reading a book except for her complexion. It would have to be a particularly interesting book. He watched also. She had figured out a place for her hand that let the knuckle of her thumb rub her pants as she moved her fingers. It was hypnotic, he had to admit, but awkward position meant she couldn’t move her hand very fast and the pleasure began to feel like a tease.

He removed his own hand from Taliyah’s back and began to masturbate, gently pushing her hand off of his penis and letting his knuckles rapidly rub the same spot that her thumb had been. 

“Oh, that’s… oh.”

“Like what you see?” asked Ekko. People said that, right? Taliyah’s breath was fast. She squeezed the back of his neck and kissed his forehead hard.

“I’ve always just- boys touching themselves always makes me…” her legs squeezed around his waist. 

Ekko could move his own hand faster, and his penis had let out a bit of fluid, so he could truly masturbate. Feeling the building pleasure, Taliyah’s breath, the dampness against the back of his hand, he didn’t need a time machine to see the future.

“Wait,” said Taliyah, “I’m going to come if you keep going.”

“Yeah. Me too. Wait?”

“...”

“So, do you want to fuck me?”

It was a little cruel, he suspected. Taliyah was, from what he knew, not inclined toward vulgarity. Using the rough monosyllabic Noxian slang instead of Zaunite made it worse. Constructing a sentence that gave her the prerogative with such a verb when she had been hesitant all evening would have an effect, in this case making her freeze and blush like wine spilled onto a tablecloth.

“Buy a girl dinner first.” She said quietly.

“What?”

“Just something I heard once.”

“Ah. So?”

“Er, yeah. I really, really want to. But I’m worried about, you know. There’s a reason creatures have sex.”

“Oh. Give us a little credit. We’re a city of inventors unconstrained by law or good sense. The first thing we built was the sex stuff.”

Taliyah did not look filled with confidence. Ekko pushed his pants off with his feet and scooted out from under her, moving toward his backpack. Brown eyes followed him. He crouched, opened the drawstring with careful pride given that the knapsack was more hole than bag, and withdrew what in any other situation Taliyah would have described as “some sort of serrated turbine with spidery grabber arms”, but in the current context was a nightmare. Ekko strode towards her with a grave expression, and her eyes were fixed on him as if hypnotized when he stopped in front of the chair and operated some triggerlike control that made the arms buzz and convulse. She shrank.

“This,” said Ekko somberly, “is a N-axial stabilizer I use to hold brackern crystals when I’m building on hextech devices. I wanted to show it off since I stole the latest model.”

Taliyah said nothing. Ekko tossed the stabilizer back toward his knapsack where it landed with a malignant skitter, and from his closed hand presented a small wax-paper pouch.

“Here we are. You just open it up, put it on the tip, aaaaaaaand roll it on. Keeps everything in, nothing to it.”

He smiled, and shook his waist so that his penis with its thin rubber coating wagged back and forth. Taliyah tried to be angry.

“I suppose you think you’re very clever.” She said. Ekko shrugged.

“Just displaying some state-of-the-art apparatus.”

She stared at him for a long moment, and he saw her face contort. It was too much. They laughed for a while, Ekko spurring Taliyah on with grabby-claw motions. He finally collapsed back onto the bed. 

“You wanna do this?”

“Yeah.” Taliyah stood and stripped while Ekko leaned back on an elbow. His erection, which had deflated a bit during the laughter, rose again. She unceremoniously tossed her shirt aside and kicked off her pants, walked over and stood in front of the bed, one hand on her hip. Ekko had briefly entertained high-minded ideas of appreciating the gestalt of her beauty, but found his eyes flicking back and forth between her breasts and the dark brushstroke of pubic hair between her legs like they were the only things in the room.

“You too.” she said.

“Am I not?”

“Shirt.”

Ekko pulled off his grey sleeveless shirt and briefly felt a mirroring of his own gaze play across his chest, butt, and crotch with barcode-reader precision.

“Alright.” Said Ekko. 

And he was.

  
  


And she was. Taliyah sat on the bed, and, because the beginning was the hardest, grabbed Ekko’s shoulder. She leaned so that she was halfway upright against the wall and pulled him along. He clearly didn’t expect her strength and so overbalanced, falling against her face first with a grunt, though he apparently was pleased with the position he found himself in if his swift focus on the nipple a few centimeters from his face was any indication. Taliyah’s leg straightened reflexively. Nipples were good, but Ekko’s mouth was only making her situation worse. She was getting cramps in muscles she didn’t know she had.

“Not now. I don’t need more. I need  _ eep _ . That’s- Ekko.  _ Ekko. _ ”

He tilted his head up innocently and his mouth was hidden from her point of view by curly brown hair. 

“You’re a real gentleman, alright? I’m flattered that your next thought was to  _ YES _ , yes. To do that. But. Right now, if you would just… go, inside me. That would be perfect. Please.”

He smiled cheeky and crawled on his hands and knees until he reached her face. They kissed, and she felt callused hands touch her thighs.

“Okay.”

Taliyah took the fifth breath one takes after nearly drowning. Of all she could feel, the first thing that registered was coolness, the slight difference in temperature between Ekko’s penis and her body. She had closed her eyes at some point. 

For all his teasing, it seemed that Ekko had been less prepared than she was. After he entered her, he immediately said, “oh, gods,” and began to breath shallowly. His hands fumbled for a place that seemed right while his hips jerked instinctively a few times. Supported by his elbows, with his arms under her back, he seemed to relax marginally.

“Good?”

“I’ll live.”

So, there was a reason people were so preoccupied with this. Chew for too long and even delicious food begs to be swallowed. Taliyah had been chewing all evening, and this was the moment she could swallow. It was satisfaction built up from all the little stretches and pressures and frictions that resulted from part of somebody else being inside her. Ekko thrust and it overflowed from her vagina to other germane bits of anatomy. It was in her neck, her breasts, the long skeletal muscles in her thighs, deep in her belly. When she exhaled, it spilled out of her lungs like smoke and she had to groan into Ekko’s shoulder in a very un-ladylike way.

Her mind was quite nearly lucid. She had plenty to focus it on. She sometimes felt a little childish when she thought about boys, but having one up close gave her a pass, she figured. She could run her hands over his back and his butt, hear the little noises he made high in his throat. She could feel the coordinations of muscle that moved him inside her. What was he feeling? What was it like to be a boy, to be inside someone?

She thought about his penis as hard as one can think about anything one has no idea about.

Ekko began to breath a little harder and linger a little longer at the bottom of each thrust. Taliyah noticed, of course. Every part of her mind except the little spark that kept her vital organs squishing around was trained on his movements. She’d realised early that there wasn’t going to be enough direct pressure on her clitoris for her to come, which she was surprised to find didn’t bother her very much. Later. Ekko, however, was close. Her eyes widened with anticipation. A few seconds passed.

“Tali I can’t-”

“Go, go, go. Please, Ekko. I need it inside me. Pleasepleasepl-”

“Oh, gods, Taliyah. Oh!” He grunted in surprise as she swung her legs over his body. She felt her leg muscles tighten, squeezing him close. 

And then he was still and quiet and taut like the warp on a loom, and Taliyah was looking down, wide eyes tied unblinking to the point below her stomach where his black hair tangled with her brown, and there were long lazy muscular contractions somewhere inside him, straining.

It was over more quickly than she expected. Ekko’s mouth found her neck, fluid motion returned to him as he was reminded of his joints’ existence. An empty feeling in her vagina as Ekko withdrew. How could her default state feel strange? Ekko was laying next to her now fiddling with the rubber, and she pressed against him, neck craned to reach his lips. It wasn’t until her hand jumped unbidden to her clit that she remembered she had another problem.

“I didn’t-” but he was already moving, sure hands propping her up so he could sit behind her. His head rested on her shoulder, arms circling around her. Lips brushed over the side of her head. She prized her fingers from between her legs and touched whatever parts of him she could reach, leaving cool dabs of moisture on his legs and hands. He squeezed her.

She had to cross her legs, grind them together. Ekko saw it.

“What do I do?”

“Ah, um,” what  _ did _ he do? “Here.”

She took his right hand, lay her own over it so the fingers overlapped.

“Open your mouth. That’s good, you just don’t want them dry. Right…  _ here _ . Can you feel my clit?”

“I can feel a lot of stuff.”

She took his middle finger, ran it up her vulva till he touched the spot that made her teeth clench.

“It’s right in between, at the top. Kind of firm.”

“Got it.”

“Just rub like this. Er, yeah, press harder. You won’t hurt me. Just… yeah.”

Taliyah’s eyes closed. Seeing was unimportant. She let Ekko continue and played with her breasts. The empty feeling inside her was gone, filled by deep ocean swells like those that had rocked the ship to Ionia, swells that leaked through her skin as sweat. Her head nodded against his. 

The build began, the unreal sensation that she got before really good orgasms that the wires were crossed in her brain; she could feel the sensation in her clitoris everywhere from scalp to toes. Between her legs it was pulsing like her heart with the rhythm that Ekko’s fingers set, Ekko’s fingers that  _ were leaving her clit nononono _

“Oh! Ekko, you have to- damn! Ah, ahh.” His fingers were dipping curiously between her labia, though he stopped when Taliyah grabbed his arms.

“What did I- are you...”

She took a rattling breath. “I’m alright. But. Er, how should- So it takes longer for girls, understand? Even when they’re touching their clit.”

“Yeah?”

“And I don’t know how it is for boys, but for us it’s like a, a ladder. When we’re almost there even changing speed can mess it up, and we’ll tumble back down.”

“And… Oh. I’m guessing stopping altogether is also no good.”

“Eureka, whiz kid.”

“I’m, er. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said gently, then let the tension she felt in every muscle seep into her voice. “But  _ do _ make me fucking come.”

She gave him no time to be shocked, but kissed him and held his head against hers. Ekko’s hand traced the cleft of her labia, found her clit, and began to move. The small anthropomorphizing part of the human mind which is always active in even the lowest cynics and allows humans to interact with death, nature, time, and each other without literally exploding or spending Too Much Money on the gleaming instruments of destruction at the hardware store briefly tried to think, “oh, poor Ms. Clit. Is that three times tonight she’s been snubbed?” before Taliyah’s sensory cortex stomped all over it like a kid on an anthill.

But it  _ had _ been three times, which was apparently one too many. Now Taliyah was on edge, jittery. She kept her hands busy so they wouldn’t drag Ekko’s away and finish the job themselves. She kept her tongue in Ekko’s mouth because it wouldn’t have anything nice to say in her own mouth. Her knees opened out and up and at the edge of their range of motion still wanted to flex further. Her toes curled so hard the joints popped.

But it was pleasure, and it was like a bowstring drawn tight from the tip of her clit to some place even deeper in her hips. When she felt rough fingers on her nipple, the string tightened. Ekko wound her up with unwavering hands. Her hips lifted from the bed and the fingers that clutched at the edge of the bunk sank into the stone like it was clay.

Was this so bad? The slight admixture of anger woke her up, placed her squarely in her body, made her selfish. She had the sudden thought, “I could do this all night,” but it didn’t even take ten seconds. The fingers didn’t stop, and when you string it too tight even a fine sinew bowstring snaps.

It hadn’t been the most intense orgasm, she reflected. It had been more like a deep yawn or the kind of stretch that takes you from the couch to the floor. That was perfect, if you asked her. She sat next to Ekko, with her hand on his soft penis and his head on her shoulder. Even five minutes later her vaginal muscles gave a pathetic heave now and then, and another half-drop of moisture welled up.

“I don’t love you,” said Ekko. She suppressed her reflex reaction and found that again he had said something that was both true and hiding just beyond the pale of conscious acknowledgement. She idly traced the deep imprint her fingers had left in the rock of the ledge a few minutes ago.

“Me neither. Does that bother you?”

“Not really.”

There was silence for another moment.

“I know you have to get back and stop, whatever’s going on in Shurima. But if you stay a while we could-”

“I won’t. I can’t. Sorry.”

“It’s alright. You don’t need to excuse yourself. This was the most probable response.”

“How do you- Why do you do that?”

“Time machine.”

“Time ma- what?”

“I use it to replay moments again and again, and I think it’s made me good at guessing what people think.”

“Is that the noisy backpack you had yesterday?”

“Well, usually the answer would be yes, but yesterday by pure coincidence it was a cage of rare parrots I was picking up from a Buhru smuggler.”

“Ah. I figured that, ‘Rawk, man overboard, Rawk, dead man walking!” would be a strange noise for a time machine to make.”

“The real one makes more of a buzz.”

“A buzz?”

“Maybe a hum, if I’ve just greased it.”

“Have you ever tried to use it for, you know, nefarious purposes?”

“Did you miss the part where I confessed to illicit animal smuggling?”

“Oh, no. I mean  _ really  _ nefarious.”

“Do you know what happens if you try to have sex wearing a Z-drive hextech closed-timelike-loop generator?”

“No?”

Ekko looked at her. His face was pale.

“Me neither. And that’s not something I think it’s necessary for science to explore.”

Taliyah’s stomach rumbled, and Ekko sat bolt upright.

“Noodles!”

Augus was asleep by the fire when they crept out, and they walked swiftly for a cheap 24-hour noodle stall one level up. The mist obscured them, as it did everything in Zaun, and their hands sliced it, daggerboards through calm ocean . Far above the moon was out, though they had no way of knowing.


End file.
